Bill Joy was the person largely responsible for the authorship of Berkeley UNIX, also known as BSD, from which springs many modern forms of UNIX, including FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Joy was also a primary figure in the development of the Java programming language. One of his most notable contributions was the vi editor.

He recently gained notoriety with his publication of an article in Wired, Why the future doesn't need us, in which he stated the neo-Luddite position that he was convinced by the growing advances in genetic engineering and nanotechnology that intelligent robots would replace humanity, at the very least in intellectual and societal dominance, in the relatively near future.